Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, November 4, 2003

As part of federal anti-terrorism efforts, all 4,688 employees of San Francisco's Municipal Railway -- from cable car operators to fare inspectors -- are being trained to spot potential evildoers amid the jumble of humanity that rides the Bay Area's busiest transit system.

Aboard Muni's buses and streetcars, where what many people would label "unusual persons" and "suspicious activity" are commonplace, picking out the bad guys from the eccentrics can be a challenge.

"The good news is you have a very experienced workforce at Muni," Jeff Beatty, an anti-terrorism expert who helps conduct the training, said Monday. "The secret is knowing your environment. When you have some people who are irregular, they're going to bubble up to those experienced employees."

Robert Herton, the Muni's security manager, said it's like being a beat cop: Bus drivers get to know the character -- and characters -- of their routes and passengers.

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"Yes, you have some unique people here," Herton said, "but you get to know that. And something out of the ordinary stands out."

In two-hour required training sessions, Muni employees along with 300 San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic parking control officers are being taught to use visual screening techniques to spot suspicious people.

Those techniques, Beatty said, have nothing to do with racial or religious profiling, which he called "tactically weak" because terrorists can easily work around it. Instead, they focus on identifying suspicious behavior and understanding how terrorists work.

In their training courses, Muni employees are being taught to look out for potential terrorist preparations such as someone casing the transit system or rehearsing an attack. They're also told how to interrupt suspicious activity safely.

Such measures are effective, Beatty said, because they can dissuade terrorists by convincing them that a transit system may be prepared.

"If a (transit agency employee) challenges you once, you think it's an alert person," he said. "But if you get challenged multiple times, you think there's a system in place."

The training, taking place until mid-December, is sponsored and paid for by the Federal Transit Administration, as part of an effort to bolster the nation's public transportation systems. Muni was singled out for the training not because of a specific threat, but because of the size of the system.

Beatty, a former Delta Force assault troop commander and operations officer, also has worked with the FBI and the CIA, and runs an anti-terrorism consulting business.

He cautioned against people becoming complacent about terrorism, saying al Qaeda terrorists typically spend three to four years planning and practicing an attack.

"Americans should not kid themselves," Beatty said. "We're just coming into the window of opportunity for the next attack."